Understanding Trust in Virtual Communities

Author(s):  
Qing Zou ◽  
Eun G. Park

With people participating in various virtual communities in everyday life, trust building between participants is significant and indispensable in order to maintain communication in both traditional and virtual communities. In particular, virtual communities provide a platform or network through which members can communicate with faster and more simultaneous interactions in invisible ways. Since the importance of trust in virtual communities has been widely recognized, trust as a complex, multi-faceted, and context-dependent concept has been examined by many researchers in several disciplines. In this chapter, the authors aim to examine the definitions and characteristics of trust in the context of virtual communities and discuss terms relevant to the concept of trust. Different types of trust are investigated. Issues, challenges and future research directions revolving around trust are discussed. In examining the concept of trust, this chapter focuses on social rather than technical aspects of trust and trust building in virtual communities.

Author(s):  
Qing Zou ◽  
Eun G. Park

This is the networked age, when people participate in various virtual communities through a platform or network of communities. Members of the communities communicate in faster and more simultaneous interactions in invisible ways. Since the importance of trust in virtual communities has been widely recognized, trust as a complex, multi-faceted, and context-dependent concept has been examined by many researchers in several disciplines. In this chapter, the authors aim to examine the definitions and characteristics of trust in the context of virtual communities and discuss terms relevant to the concept and types of trust. Relevant issues on trust and trust building in virtual communities are discussed, and future research directions are suggested for further study.


Author(s):  
Ammar Rashid ◽  
William Yu Chung Wang ◽  
Felix B. Tan

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in cloud services in academic literature. Most research in this area has focused on the technical aspects of designing and implementing cloud services, with few studies focusing on understanding the value of cloud services and the processes by which consumer and service providers engage each other to co-create these services. This chapter explains the co-creation processes, and, the role of consumer in the value co-creation process of cloud services. It incorporates extant marketing and information systems literature, industry reports, and practical experience reflections to highlight the significance of cloud services. The drivers of co-creation are explored with the description of co-creation processes and the underlying factors involved in value co-creation of cloud services. The chapter concludes by outlining the opportunities associated with the development of cloud services, noting future research directions and discussing academic and managerial implications.


Author(s):  
Jorge A. Romero

The understanding of the link between Information Technology (IT) investments and firm performance is still not completely understood in spite of numerous studies. However, these studies are not united in how they examine the effects of IT on business performance. They differ in their criteria, methodologies, and samples. Therefore, while there are positive effects associated with IT on firm performance, it is still difficult to reach overarching conclusions and highlight that there is still a need for further research. Specifically, this chapter contributes to this area of study by discussing the different types of benefits that firms can get from IT investments, examining the use of accounting variables to quantify the effect of IT, and providing future research directions.


Author(s):  
George A. Sielis ◽  
Aimilia Tzanavari ◽  
George A. Papadopoulos

Recommender or recommendation systems are software tools that make useful suggestions to users, by taking into account their profile, preferences and/or actions during interaction with an application or website. They are usually personalized and can refer to items to buy, people to connect to or books/ articles to read. Recommender Systems (RS) aim at helping users with their interaction by bringing to surface the information that is relevant to them, their needs, or their tasks. This article's objective is to present a review of the different types of RS, the techniques and methods used for building such systems, the algorithms used to generate the recommendations and how these systems can be evaluated. Finally, a number of topics are discussed as envisioned future research directions.


2002 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 13-28 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piyush Kumar Sinha ◽  
Arindam Banerjee ◽  
Dwarika Prasad Uniyal

Store choice is a decision that a shopper is fairly involved in. It is important for a store to understand this behaviour for developing marketing strategies to attract and keep its clientele. It is found that shoppers choose the store based on many aspects that could be classified as primary and image based. It is also found that the importance of each of these aspects changes with the kind of store the shopper wants to visit. In the Indian context where the shopper does not have much variety in store format, the type of store is recognized by the kind of product the store deals in. The paper is an attempt to understand this behaviour of the shopper. The shoppers are explored for the primary reasons for choosing a store. Then, using a factor analysis, the several image dimensions are classified. Further, using multinomial logit regression, the store choice pattern is studied across different types of store. Implications for the managers in the retail business are drawn and future research directions have been highlighted.


Author(s):  
Kilian Gericke ◽  
Boris Eisenbart

AbstractResearch and industrial practice have produced a host of function models and modeling approaches over the last decades. Each of these is meant to support designers in their design endeavors. Industrial practice is excessively diversified in terms of contextual requirements, aims, and adopted processes; this automatically begs the question which of the existing models should be selected for application in a specific situation. This paper sets out to contribute to this discourse. It strives to benchmark the fairly novel integrated function modeling (IFM) framework against the well-established function structures modeling approach. The paper comparatively investigates the respective capabilities of the approaches, following the benchmarking protocol used earlier in relation to this Special Issue. Function structures are used as reference as they represent one of the most widespread function modeling approaches in research and practice. Both function structures and the IFM framework are exemplarily applied for modeling a glue gun. The gradual generation and refinement of the models is used to showcase their respective benefits and shortcomings. Eventually, the IFM framework is found to excel over function structures in terms of comprehensiveness and support for different types of function analyses. Finally, future research directions are proposed.


Author(s):  
Victor X. Wang

This article uses a real case to illustrate that marketing educational programs through technology is affected by one’s philosophies positively or negatively, depending on the philosophies adopted. Seven philosophies are discussed in relationship to marketing educational programs via technology. Connections between the seven philosophies and different types of universities/colleges are drawn. Future research directions also revolve around marketing educational programs, Web 2.0 technologies and one’s philosophies. It is recommended that universities/colleges seriously consider hiring those administrators who have adopted the right philosophies as the wrong philosophies will work against the mission of certain academic departments, hence the whole university or college.


2018 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 83-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Rouel ◽  
Richard J. Stevenson ◽  
Evelyn Smith

There is evidence that different types of contaminants produce different responses and have different motivations for avoidance. Contaminants directly associated with disease (direct contaminants) are motivated by disgust avoidance, whereas contaminants indirectly associated with disease (indirect contaminants) and contaminants associated with harmful substances (harm contaminants) are motivated by harm avoidance and threat estimations. This study aims to confirm this distinction between contaminant types and examine the role of cognitive load, awareness and time on processing these threats. One hundred and four participants completed three chain of contagion tasks with direct, indirect, and harm contaminants. Cognitive load, awareness of contamination and time were manipulated during the tasks. Consistent with previous findings, direct contaminants produced stronger disgust responses, while harm and indirect contaminants produced stronger threat estimations. Increasing cognitive load did not impact processing of any type of contaminant. There was evidence that a time delay reduced the spread of contagion for all contaminants. This highlights the importance of time in altering the perception of contamination threat. Implications and future research directions are discussed.


2014 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matevž Rašković

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to address the misapplication of the embeddedness concept in Ferraris’s (2014) paper and show how it needs to be used as a cornerstone economic sociology concept within his proposed framework. This paper is a response to his paper in the Multinational Business Review “Rethinking the literature on ‘multiple embeddedness’ and subsidiary-specific advantages”. Design/methodology/approach – The paper outlines the origin of the embeddedness concept and its evolution within the economic sociology literature. It addresses different types of embeddedness and continues with a critical analysis of Ferraris’s (2014) proposed framework of four main types of multinational enterprise (MNE) relationships. It provides suggestions for its improvement and application, as well as discusses the appropriate applications of embeddedness concept by international business (IB) scholars in MNE research. Findings – The paper shows how the embeddedness concept is mostly used as a metaphor and as a simple umbrella label for different types of connections between MNEs, their subsidiaries and different types of environments. The analysis of Ferraris’s (2014) proposed framework shows how MNE embeddedness is incorrectly understood as emanating from the balancing of local responsiveness and global integration within MNEs, where subsidiaries develop subsidiary-specific advantages (SSAs) by recombining home – host country-specific advantages and parent – subsidiary firm-specific advantages (FSAs). Originality/value – The paper adds to the existing IB understanding of MNEs’ multiple embeddedness and subsidiaries’ dual embeddedness through a wider and more structured economic sociology perspective. It provides an appropriate economic sociology-grounded typology of different types of embeddedness. A discussion of possible future research directions stresses how the embeddedness – dissembeddedness capability is a key source of MNE competitive advantage, which moderates the actual recombination process of producing FSAs and SSAs.


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